From CDA to the IMF: A Teacher’s Plea for Hope, Honesty, and Redemption

I am not a judge, a prosecutor, or an investigator. I am a writer, a teacher, and a tutor of Esperanto, a language invented so that strangers might understand one another. I have no authority to pass sentence on anyone, and I say so at the outset because what follows comes from a wounded heart, not from certainty. I am also, I confess, faint of heart. When I see the coffin of a soldier draped in the green crescent flag, I cannot hold back my tears.

Almost every day, somewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the former FATA, or in the mountains and deserts of Balochistan, a young man in uniform gives his life. A mother is told that the son she raised on bread and prayer will not come home. A father salutes a box he cannot bear to open. A small child, too young to understand, is given a folded flag and told to be brave. These are not statistics. They are households that will never again be whole, and I cannot look at them without asking what they died to protect.

Among my students are officers of the finance and audit departments of the Capital Development Authority. Teaching them has been one of the quiet joys of my life. But teachers hear what students carry in their hearts, and over many evenings I have heard stories that trouble my sleep. They speak in low voices of files that move only when touched by the right hand, of land whose use changes with the identity of its buyer, of audit objections that vanish, and of fraud so routine that honest clerks apologize for noticing it.

What frightens them most is not the wrongdoing itself. It is the silence around it. This is happening in Islamabad, the capital of the republic, within sight of the office of the Prime Minister, a few minutes’ drive from the headquarters of the very institutions created to prevent it. The National Accountability Bureau is here. The Federal Investigation Agency is here. The Federal Board of Revenue is here. My students ask, with a weariness that breaks my heart, “If those who are meant to watch are silent, who will take notice?” I have no answer. I only know that a state which cannot account for its own capital cannot ask its citizens to trust it anywhere else.

I want to be careful, because grief tempts a writer toward exaggeration. No single authority, however troubled, can by itself bring a nation of 260 million people to the brink. Pakistan’s troubles have many fathers: old political failures, economic mismanagement, and the burdens of war and debt. But a nation does not fall only from the blows of its enemies. It also falls from the slow rot of the institutions that hold it up, and when that rot sits in the capital’s own administrative heart, the damage is not local. It becomes a lesson taught to every ambitious young official in every provincial city: that the rules are for the poor, that the ledger is for the naive, that the patient thief is rewarded.

A dossier has reached my hands. It names three retired officials of the CDA: Tahir Shamshad, formerly Member Planning and Engineering; Ghulam Sarwar Sindhu, formerly Director General Planning; and Iftikhar Ali Haidari, a Director CDA. It alleges that they accumulated wealth on a staggering scale. I must be plain: these are allegations. I cannot verify them, no court known to me has found them proven, and every person named is entitled to the presumption of innocence and a full opportunity to answer. I name them only because the appeal I am about to make requires it, and I ask readers to treat their names as the subject of a question, not the object of a verdict.

The dossier also offers a comparison I cannot forget, even while I doubt its precise figures. It suggests that the wealth attributed to these three men could fund, for nearly two years, the entire budgets of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the EX-FATA, and Gilgit-Baltistan, the very places where children study in broken buildings, where hospitals are a day’s journey away, and where hunger is a permanent guest. If even a fraction of that were true, it would be an indictment not only of individuals but of all of us who allowed such a distance to open between the palace and the village.

Now I turn to the International Monetary Fund, which has begun to look seriously at the declared assets of civil servants from grade 17 to grade 22. I welcome this with what little hope I have left. For decades, asset declarations in our country have been rituals, papers filed and forgotten. If an outside institution now insists on scrutiny, perhaps something will finally shift. If an IMF forensic investigation pulls back the curtain on the CDA’s former member planning, it will expose a web of corruption so bizarre and tragic it defies belief—public officials binding their own families together, listing their wives alongside their friends’ spouses on high-value property deeds. It marks a horrific first in the history of white-collar crime. That men elevated to positions of solemn public trust could fall to such dismal, tragic desperation is a sobering reminder of how completely power can corrupt

And so I appeal, humbly and with folded hands, to the Managing Director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva. Madam, I beg you to establish a dedicated commission to study the tools and techniques by which officials in Pakistan hide their assets. My students tell me that the old methods of concealment, wealth held in the name of a spouse, a brother, or a sister, are no longer the frontier. Those who wish to hide wealth have learned that the first places investigators look are the officer’s own family. So the assets drift outward, into the names of distant relatives, employees, drivers, domestic staff, and paper identities that lead nowhere. The trail is built to end at a name with no visible connection to the person who truly benefits.

If this is even partly true, then auditing declarations will not be enough. Reviewing an officer’s stated assets and his wife’s assets is like searching for a fugitive only in the house he has already left. Your commission should follow the money, not the names. It should ask who pays taxes on a property, who actually uses it, who collects the rent, whose lawyers appear when a title is challenged, and whose lifestyle matches no salary the state has ever paid. Beneficial ownership, not registered ownership, is the only honest question. Such a study would help not only Pakistan but every developing nation whose treasuries are drained by the same quiet arts, and it could be conducted with the cooperation of the United Nations and Pakistan’s own courts.

I return to the soldiers, because they are why I write. A soldier does not ask whether the officer who signs the land file in Islamabad is honest. He goes where he is sent. He dies believing that the country he protects is worth protecting, and that its wealth, however modest, belongs to its people. When his body returns to a village with no proper road, no working clinic, and a school without a roof, the family bows their heads and says the word we have taught them to say: sabr, patience. I sometimes think we have asked too much patience of the poor and too little honesty of the powerful. Unrest is not born from nothing. Where a young man sees no future and knows that resources meant for him were spent elsewhere, despair turns to anger, and anger is always searching for a flag to march under.

The hour is also perilous. Pakistan faces serious challenges on both of its frontiers, from India in the east and from Afghanistan in the west. Our soldiers are brave, but courage alone does not win wars in the modern age. The economy is the mother of military power. An army cannot be equipped, fed, trained, and honored by a state that is dependent on borrowed money and bleeding from within. Every rupee that leaves the treasury through a hidden door weakens the shield on our borders as surely as an enemy’s shell.

That is why I make a second appeal, this time to the Prime Minister and the Government of Pakistan, and I make it knowing how unusual it will sound. Let there be a lawful, transparent, court-supervised process, in the spirit of a plea bargain, examining the affairs of the three retired officers named above. Should it be established that any of them holds unlawfully acquired wealth, let them be invited to return just fifty percent of it, openly and voluntarily, into an independently audited national fund for the rehabilitation of Balochistan, Azad Kashmir, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the former tribal districts. Let that fund build schools, hospitals, and clean water systems. Let every rupee be published, every contract be public, and every school carry a plaque telling the community where its foundation came from.

And if they do so, if men who are alleged to have taken from the nation choose instead to give back to it, then I ask the Prime Minister to consider honoring that act of restitution with the Nishan-e-Pakistan, the highest civil award of our republic. I know this proposal will trouble many hearts, including my own. It may seem strange to honor those who stand accused. But I ask readers to consider what the award would celebrate: not the alleged wrongdoing, but the return, the willingness to trade a fortune for redemption. Nations have often chosen reconciliation over endless litigation when the alternative was decades of courtroom stalemate and no recovery at all. A recovered fortune that builds a thousand schools is worth more to a starving child than a conviction that returns nothing. Let the honor also be a signal to every other official hiding wealth in borrowed names: come forward, restore what is not yours, and the nation will meet you with grace rather than only with punishment.

I believe, perhaps naively, that such a fund, honestly managed, would do more to calm unrest than another year of military operations. Not because bullets are never necessary, but because hope, once planted, is a stronger wall than any fortress. My proposal is only a suggestion from a humble tutor. I have no personal quarrel with any CDA official. I know many of them to be decent, and my own students are proof that honest people still work inside that building. My grief is not with individuals but with a system that lets suspicion grow unanswered. Every person named here must be heard fully, with every right to counsel and defense, because justice that ignores due process is only vengeance in a robe.

In Esperanto we have a word, espero, meaning hope. It is the root of the language’s very name, since Esperanto means “one who hopes.” I have taught that word for many years, and never has it felt so heavy in my mouth. I hope the IMF will look carefully and not be fooled by clever paper. I hope the agencies that sleep in Islamabad will wake. I hope the honest officers, the ones who go home each evening with clean hands and frightened hearts, will find courage and protection. And I hope that one day a mother in a distant village will receive her son’s flag, not with the bitter thought that the rich grew richer while he died, but with the quiet knowledge that his country was worthy of his sacrifice.

Until then, I will keep teaching, keep writing, and keep weeping. It is all I know how to do